7 ideas
| 9764 | Inspiration and social improvement need wisdom, but not professional philosophy [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Professional philosophers have no peculiar fitness for inspirational and edifying writing, or helping to get society on an even keel (though we should do what we can). Wisdom may fulfil these crying needs: 'sophia' yes, but 'philosophia' not necessarily. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Has Philosophy Lost Contact with People? [1979], p.193) | |
| A reaction: This rather startlingly says that philosophy is unlikely to lead to wisdom, which is rather odd when it is defined as love of that very thing. Does love of horticulture lead to good gardening. I can't agree. Philosophy is the best hope of 'sophia'. |
| 9763 | For a good theory of the world, we must focus on our flabby foundational vocabulary [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Our traditional introspective notions - of meaning, idea, concept, essence, all undisciplined and undefined - afford a hopelessly flabby and unmanageable foundation for a theory of the world. Control is gained by focusing on words. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Has Philosophy Lost Contact with People? [1979], p.192) | |
| A reaction: A very nice statement of the aim of modern language-centred philosophy, though the task offered appears to be that of an under-labourer, when the real target, even according to Quine, is supposed to be a 'theory of the world'. |
| 9216 | Each area of enquiry, and its source, has its own distinctive type of necessity [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The three sources of necessity - the identity of things, the natural order, and the normative order - have their own peculiar forms of necessity. The three main areas of human enquiry - metaphysics, science and ethics - each has its own necessity. | |
| From: Kit Fine (The Varieties of Necessity [2002], 6) | |
| A reaction: I would treat necessity in ethics with caution, if it is not reducible to natural or metaphysical necessity. Fine's proposal is interesting, but I did not find it convincing, especially in its view that metaphysical necessity doesn't intrude into nature. |
| 9214 | Unsupported testimony may still be believable [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: I may have good reason to believe some testimony, for example, even though the person providing the testimony has no good reason for saying what he does. | |
| From: Kit Fine (The Varieties of Necessity [2002], 5) | |
| A reaction: Thus small children, madmen and dreamers may occasionally get things right without realising it. I take testimony to be merely one more batch of evidence which has to be assessed in building the most coherent picture possible. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 9215 | Causation is easier to disrupt than logic, so metaphysics is part of nature, not vice versa [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: It would be harder to break P-and-Q implying P than the connection between cause and effect. This difference in strictness means it is more plausible that natural necessities include metaphysical necessities, than vice versa. | |
| From: Kit Fine (The Varieties of Necessity [2002], 6) | |
| A reaction: I cannot see any a priori grounds for the claim that causation is more easily disrupted than logic. It seems to be based on the strategy of inferring possibilities from what can be imagined, which seems to me to lead to wild misunderstandings. |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |